Centered mortises with OF1400

[Stoli]

I've read Paul-Marcel's advice to use a pair of edge guides with the OF1400, but decided to only buy one and use a home made jig in place of the second. I utilize the festool edge guide's micro adjust capability, and always use it as the primary reference. My jig is used to snug up against the workpiece.

I will also enter this in the video contest.

 

[fshanno]

I've read Paul-Marcel's advice to use a pair of edge guides with the OF1400, but decided to only buy one and use a home made jig in place of the second. I utilize the festool edge guide's micro adjust capability, and always use it as the primary reference. My jig is used to snug up against the workpiece.

I will also enter this in the video contest.

Excellent adaptation!  What you've done should deliver much better stability than two stock edge guides.  You've essentially replaced the expensive plastic mortiser that Festool sells. 

Your process offers pretty much infinite flexiblity up to the limit of the plunge of a given router.  But most of the time I'm going to stick to mortise width matching the width of the bit and mill my tenon stock to match.  That way I can just eyeball center and make sure I reference both pieces from the same side of the joint.  No measuring required.  Simply use a gauge block for offsets. 

 

[Stoli]

If you will mill your tenons to match the mortise (which I agree is a more typical approach), you can follow my method but ignore the measurements -- simply set the guides to be close to centered, and take 2 passes with the router, rotating the router in between.  That will ensure a perfectly centered mortise, whose width is a little wider than the bit.  This is analogous to Norm's method of centering dados by swapping the boards end for end on the table saw.